by Alex Oliver
A hissing cloud of gas was pouring off the emergency decompression panel now, the metal bubbling and writhing. Already a fist sized hole had opened to the other side, and then a long shaving fell with a splot to the floor and they could see the bridge door. She exchanged a look with Ademola, and was surprised to find his expression uncertain, even squeamish. "Problem?"
"We ain't going to hurt him bad, right?"
She could have laughed as she widened the hole with the hard heel of the acid resistant container. The hole was now large enough to step through, though she was going to give it a moment or two longer to avoid accidental contact.
Seriously? Was this a pacifist marine? How... how precious. She grinned a hard grin, only one more fragile barrier between herself and her quarry. "You just leave him to me."
And that was when the ship exploded.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rescue or kidnap?
The lights went out. In the pitch black, the artificial gravity died and she was flung up against the ceiling. She might have lost consciousness for a second or two - it was hard to tell in the sensory deprivation of floating in the abyss. But when she next registered anything, it was the warmth of liquid on her face and the heart stopping hiss of an air leak somewhere. "Ademola?"
"Here ma'am," he sounded shaky and disembodied in the dark, but he was alive.
Jones' voice came over the tannoy, squeaky with shock. "What the fuck did you do, you mad bitch?" So it hadn't been Jones, and that meant they were under attack by an unknown assailant, and things were about to get real.
Aurora toggled her radio, "Crouch, are you at your station yet? We need gravity, lights and sensors asap."
There was no reply on the radio, but several things happened at once. Emergency lights flickered and lit dim blue. Gravity re-engaged just as the door that had been slowly dissolving slid fully open with a whoosh and suck of emptying air. Floating up by the ceiling as she was, she fell instantly and painfully, belly flopping into the floor. Ademola fell on top of her, driving an elbow with sickening pain into the small of her back.
The air was escaping. With a blur of laborious speed - a man running hard against a current, Jones burst out of the open bridge doors, through the ruined and retracted emergency decompression panel, literally treading on Ademola's shoulder as he went, his speed picking up the more distance he gained from the outflow of air.
Seu bosta! Aurora shoved Ademola aside, got up on hands and knees, tried to pant, but could not get enough air. Her lungs aching, her chest stripped and her eyes and mouth dry and stiff, she lurched for the bridge. The wind tore tears and breath from her as she reached the doors and looked out, saw the great gaping hole in the hull. Two spider-like repair robots had gathered at its edges and five more scuttled up in the scant second she watched, mesmerized as always by the sight of space. No barrier between herself and that immensity. She could almost smell it, something like peaches, like the blossom in her mother's orchard white as snow.
Angry, she wrenched her concentration back where it belonged. Something had struck the bridge, bent the hull plates in and punctured the seals. Some kind of missile. And now all the air on the ship was farting out of the gap like a puncture in an air-bed.
She punched the door control to close and seal it, allowed herself a moment to slump, once the pressure had normalized around her, so she could warm the cavities of her body back up and unfreeze her eyes.
Then she got back on the radio. "Mboge? You've secured the armory?"
"Yes ma'am. What was--?"
"No time. I need you to take charge here. Get to the space suits. We need crew on the bridge. It is depressurized and we are under attack."
"Yes ma'am."
Ademola was back on his feet. She wasn't sure if the blood on his face was his own or hers. She could feel a little scalp wound above her eyebrow throbbing, had to keep blinking blood out of her eye. "You fit, sergeant?"
"I'm good," he said. But he was obviously lying, because when she turned and sprinted after Jones, he fell behind in three steps. "Ah, no. Hellfire!"
His leg had turned under him. As he hopped over to support himself on the wall he couldn’t put any weight on his right foot at all. The humour of the situation struck her forcibly. "That about summarizes it sergeant. Radio Atallah, get yourself seen to. Tell Mboge when he comes I want evasive maneuvers and I want us out of orbit at once."
"You're going somewhere?"
"I've still got an escaped criminal on the loose."
"Let him go," Ademola insisted, soft and pained. "Where can he hide, after all? We'll flush him out when we're safe."
She didn't have time to explain that that wasn't how it worked. She didn't ignore one threat just because another one had turned up. She dealt with both, or either would take the ship down. With a dismissive gesture, she turned and ran after Jones.
Plainly he hadn't known about the attack, which meant that whoever was shooting at them hadn't formed part of his plans. Chances were he'd been in earnest about intending to go to Snow City and not caring about anything else. He'd found himself thwarted in the aim of getting the Froward to take him there, first by her intervention and then by this mysterious threat. So what would he do?
Well, in his place, she would abandon ship while its crew were occupied. She would take one of the lifeboats or preferably the Captain's launch. He could have found the launch’s location in the computer, thrown the gravity and decompressed the corridor to keep them occupied and unable to follow him, and dashed straight there. So that was where she would look for him now.
Skidding around the final corner, she slid down the ladder to the cheerless little cubical that was the launch bay dock. The warning lights of the bay doors were cycling red and the airlock closing even as she sprinted up. She had to turn shoulder on and fit herself through the gap sideways. Even so the doors shuddered to a halt when they were squeezing the breath out of her, and the failsafe claxon blared, protesting that there was an obstruction in the airlock.
With a wrenching struggle that bruised her breasts, she managed to eel her way inside. The outer door slammed and the vents hissed above her head. Faintly, through the inner door, she could hear Jones's voice, sounding high pitched and shrill and hard done by.
Pressure equalized. The inner door rolled back and she flung herself out into the launch's cabin, where Jones had just dropped his hands from their grip on his hair and was turning to face her. Not in shock, as she would have hoped, nor in fear, but in an oddly guilty kind of calculation, almost as though he was glad to see her.
That didn't seem like a good thing.
Jones's eyes returned to the launch’s controls, widened, and then he was laughing with the gasping hyperventilation of a man just this side of hysteria. She edged warily closer, because it was pretty clear now he did have strange powers, and she had no idea what he could do in this fey mood.
"What's so funny?"
His laughter scaled up a note as he backed away. "It's fucking manual! What kind of stone-age shit is this that you have to fly by hand? You people! You people, what the hell?"
"What planet are you from that doesn't appreciate human skill, Jones?” she tried, quiet but firm, trying to talk him down. “God gave some of us speed and reflexes because he meant us to use them, and didn't give them to others because they were meant to do something else. That's basic orthodoxy."
"Yeah, yeah," his voice lowered faintly, and the manic glow in his burnished eyes faded, but she didn't like the calculation that took its place. "And women are meant to suffer pain in childbirth, so let's not prescribe anaesthetic. Let's let them scream while we call ourselves righteous."
Her own sympathy for him blew out into absolute cold. "You want to talk to me about the pains of childbirth?" She had been feeling them ever since they ripped little Autumn out of her arms, nearly breaking her fingers to make her let go. Even now the emptiness inside was as though she had already had her cells exploded from within by fast forming ice. She pul
led her stunner, aimed it between his eyes. "Into the airlock, Mr. Jones."
Jones shook his head, his smile turned quite sane and far too smug. He backed to the instrument panel, and slid sideways across it, his hand outstretched, looking for a specific button.
"You'll have to carry me," he said, with a low note of triumph. "If you stun me you'll have to carry me out. You in your sleeveless shirt."
Why should that matter? She thought back on the day, on the guards' reports. He had touched Ramjet, which had caught her attention as odd at the time. He'd always been very non-tactile before, careful not to draw attention to himself in a way that had struck her as modest, feminine even.
But this morning he had deliberately touched Ramjet. After which, without any of his characteristic bluster, Ramjet had touched Ignatious. Ignatious had seemed fine, until he uncharacteristically disappeared from the mess without attempting to wheedle O'Kane for left-overs. The next thing they knew, Jones was loose. Any one of these things might have been random variance, but the chain suggested something else. Mind control through touch? Had the riot been an engineered attempt to get a guard into Jones’s cell - a guard who could be somehow infected to his influence?
As she stood, turning this new thought over, Jones lunged out and punched the button for launch. She felt the engines kick in behind her, and the forward viewscreen showed the bay door open, and Cygnus 5 bright in the sky. The cabin flooded with blue underwater light. They were so close above the little dot that was the colony, that its fields showed up as an incongruous emerald where the terraforming had taken hold against the teal background of the native flora.
"I don't know how to fly this thing," Jones said quietly, smiling at her. "But you do."
The implication struck her with abhorrence. He meant to get his hands on her bare skin and use that touch to enslave her mind? Dear lord, she'd thought he was a murderer, but he was worse. "No." she said, flat and angry, her stunner in her hand.
He dodged the first beam, light and fast on his feet. The second went awry when a star-like twinkle from the planet below disrupted her attention and aim. "Don't!" he gasped out, apparently as startled as she was. He raised his hands. "That's what happened before. I saw that, down on the planet, just before--"
He'd stopped moving to talk, so she shot him full in the chest, watched him slither and thud to the deck with grim satisfaction. Kicking him away from the pilot's seat, she slid into the familiar position with satisfaction, buckling in.
Since she was out here, she flew the launch around Froward, noting that the bridge was the only damage, and that the repair drones had already formed themselves into a lattice across the hole, were passing each other squares of deck plating. Blue flames and yellow sparks flickered over the ship's surface as they welded the patch together.
Long and short range scanners detected no other vessels in this part of space, other than the Governor's private ship Charity, dormant and buried in its silo on the planet.
Puzzled, but reassured they were not facing some kind of Source fleet or outworlds pirate, she steered back towards the dock. If Jones couldn't fly the launch, then he could safely be locked in here until the Governor had been notified of their arrival and could give word to send the prisoners down. The bridge would soon be airtight again. The situation was contained.
Except... except... She was still wondering who under God's grace had attacked them in the first place when the proximity alarm went off. With no power source to alert the sensors, it had sailed in, dark against the dark of space until it hit the faint beams of Froward's boundary indicators. The launch's spots picked out perfect circles of jagged rock, black as vacuum. Something huge was tumbling through the lights.
Time slowed just long enough for her to add it together. The twinkle on the planet, the hole in the bridge. Someone down there was hurling rocks at them, blasting them with quarried out great big chunks of rock like something from a medieval siege.
Time sped up again. She pushed the engines to maximum, feeling the frame of the launch groan and shake in protest. They began to gather speed. But the rock was damn near on them already. Rock filled the viewscreen from one side to the other. Rock to leeward, it was closing in too fast. She urged the launch forward with soft frustrated cries. “Come on! Come on!” Her hands slipped with sweat on the controls and her fear felt so bright it was almost exaltation.
Incoming, incoming, incoming.
Then it hit.
CHAPTER SIX
Shipwreck
It hit the engines. The launch was almost past it - a huge rock, how the hell had it got up here from the planet's surface? One drive module simply burst, two more buckled and the instrument panel in front of her lit up red with flashing lights and radiation hazard warnings.
The impact sent the launch spinning. The stars were a field of spiral white lines in the viewscreen. There was no feeling of momentum or movement, of course not, because the internal gravity had not been compromised, but there was a soft ssh of escaping air from somewhere aft.
Not too bad. They had not been destroyed. She could still fix this. Gritting her teeth, concentrating on the spinning gauges and the whirling stars, she attempted to stabilize the launch's rotation. The thrusters were ragged under her hands, but some of them answered. The view of vertiginous white lines turned slowly back into whirling stars, and then the planet's arc swirled into the viewscreen and gave her a point to aim at, a visual reference to help her pull out of the spin.
After what felt like hours of fine adjustments, hindered by the shake in her fingers and the fact that the nav computer had gone off line, she got the vessel on an even keel again. All the swirling was inside her head now, her brain fogged with too many calculations, adjustments, careful mathematics. Tired, she was so tired. Maybe there was something to be said for Jones' attitude of not turning down mechanical help when you could have it.
A red gold flicker in the corner of the screen for a moment looked horribly like Froward was on fire No, it was on fire! The missile had only clipped the launch, barely been slowed by it, had probably plowed straight on and hit Froward squarely amidships. She wanted to follow it with her eye, make sure it was all right, make sure the people on board - her people - would survive, make sure it was still space-worthy, but she had bigger problems of her own.
Because now, instead of being a helpful landmark in the window, Cygnus 5 filled half the viewscreen and she could feel it through the floor - she could feel its gravity locked onto the launch like a tractor beam. While she had been concentrating on pulling out of her spin, she had let the launch fall too close to the planet, and it had caught her.
I need to do today over from the start, she thought, and was surprised at herself for still having any levity left.
Well, falling out of the sky was a position that was not conducive to mulling over one's regrets. She pulled back on the steering yoke, already feeling the thud and thunder of atmosphere against the ship's belly. Maybe she could skip off it like a stone off a lake. But the thrusters were dying under her hands and something in the cabin was shrieking and the radiation alarm had passed pinging and gone on to blare, dopplering in and out like a police siren, and every moment that passed added weight to the controls, until pulling back on the yoke made even her high-gravity muscles burn under the skin.
The launch had been designed to land and take off from a planet's surface. It's stubby little wings allowed for some maneuvering, and the ceramic layer on its underside was keeping most of the blazing heat of re-entry out, but it was meant to do this with full engines, with full thrusters.
Thickening wind curled into what felt like a substantial hole in the stern and battered at the components it found there. Engine feed lines, she realized as two of them wrenched themselves away, tore. The engines died and hot fuel sprayed from the lines to meet the hot tiles. The air sucked itself out of her mouth briefly, and then there was a whooomph and a wave of heat, and the air inside the cabin wavered above the instruments as the
back of her neck scorched.
There was no chance of picking somewhere to land. The launch was barely even an aircraft now, more of a stone. No sight of the stars any more. Sky had closed itself around them, and beneath them the smooth aquamarine and tan of a planet seen from space had become distant mountain ranges, and forests, blue-green forests from horizon to horizon. She couldn't see the settlement but she braced a foot on the control panel and using all the strength of her back and legs, wrenched the heavy, unresponsive steering gear in the direction she guessed it to be.
She got a little over another five hundred miles closer before the maneuvering thrusters failed altogether and they dropped with a lurch into a final, un-powered crash landing. She aimed for a river, held on, sweating in the heat, hurting all over. Just on the thin edge of total exhaustion there was one moment of transcendent beauty, when the orange sun shone directly ahead and the snow on the fresh, untouched mountains were flames of copper and gold, and the long graceful branches of the trees swayed weightlessly like water weed below.
I'm in Your hands.
Then they hit. Sudden deceleration threw her hard against her straps, knocking the breath out of her. There was a crash and a soft noise as Jones's unconscious body was thrown against the viewscreen and bounded off. Blood hit her in the face, but she kept steering, kept away from the cliffs, the juts of granite, kept it skidding through whippy thickets to slow her down gently, without risking that sudden, catastrophic stop.
The rushing blur of things coming toward her began to separate into discrete objects as their speed slackened. The thuds and groaning and tears all over the airframe slowed and then at last ceased as the launch settled to a stop.
Aurora too stopped for a long, unconscionable moment, her tired brain and exhausted body going awol against her will. It felt like a long time, at least, that she sat and was nothing, while a vague impression of blueness filtered through to her from the outside and maybe she slept, or something like it.